


reverie

by minyard03



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Dreams vs. Reality, Gen, How Do I Tag, Noah Makes Everyone Sad, a year after the 4th of july, and then he dreams of kavinsky, before adam goes to college, but things seem too real, the dreamer hasn't been dreaming great
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-23 02:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8309599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minyard03/pseuds/minyard03
Summary: Ronan hasn't been dreaming right. Interrupted dreams, no dreams at all, dreams that feel uncomfortably real or dreams of nothing for hours at a time. Cabeswater isn't right. Ronan's not alone in there and Kavinsky didn't join him intentionally, either.(or, the one where the greywaren takes a thief out of his dreams)





	

Ronan hadn’t dreamt at all in months. 

It wasn’t like there was something wrong with him  - he didn’t think so - but he’d found it almost near impossible to dream for the first time in his life. Dreams happened, or began to happen, but once Ronan began to see things clearly, and understand he was dreaming, he was ripped from his mind and startled awake in Monmouth. It’d been happening for weeks upon weeks. Gansey didn’t know, and simply thought Ronan’s insomnia was getting worse because of stress over Adam going to college. None of his friends knew the problems he was facing with dreams, because how  _ wrong  _ would that be? Ronan was the dreamer. Ronan was the boy who dreamed and lived in his head as he slept. How could he be a dreamer who doesn’t dream?

It was sometime at the end of June when his non-dreaming streak started to get both worse and better at the same time. His nightmares got much, much worse than they were before, and he had absolutely no explanation as to why. Most nights he waited and waited for Noah to be sitting next to the bed as he jolted awake, but the empty room and only the quiet wind outside would greet him. Sometimes, when they got particularly bad, especially involving his friend, he’d sit in his old room, sit on the bed that was never used and let out the empty feeling he’d felt since Noah left.

It wasn’t Noah that caused his lack of dreams or the worsening of them when they started to come back. Ronan was sure of that. When his dreams started coming back, they hardly made much sense at all. Like a babble of an infant telling a story nobody could understand, Ronan found himself waking up in confusion and almost dazed from the senseless nightmares. 

The first night the nightmares stopped was worst of all. The dream had nothing. It felt like real time, too. He stepped into cabeswater and there was nothing. The trees didn’t move, not a sound replied when he yelled out, not a thing appeared when he willed for it too. All he could do was sit and wait for his physical body to wake come morning. He woke up exhausted as if he hadn’t slept at all. The next night was the same. He woke up halfway through the third night, only to find himself dozing back off into the forest of nothing.

The next night, Cabeswater was back to normal. Things happened when he willed them to happen, the trees waved and spoke to him as he walked around the find the abnormalities or answers as to what on earth was going on with his head. Only, he found the abnormality as he stepped around the trees. Twisted, broken, with roots growing through them were a pair of white sunglasses that Ronan hadn’t seen or thought about in over a year. They were darkened with dream-dirt, and Ronan’s heart simply stopped the second he laid eyes on the too-dark lenses of the glasses he’d dreamt the summer before. The memories of late nights dreaming and drinking flooded his mind and it’s all he could think of the entire day after he woke up. Gansey knew something was up, and Adam did too, who pulled Gansey offside to talk about Ronan when they thought he wasn’t listening. Ronan’s odd behaviour caused Adam a great deal of anxiety, who was flying into Boston for two weeks to deal with school things in Cambridge. Adam didn’t want to leave with Ronan so tetchy and out of it. Ronan had to force him away at departures, and kissed him goodbye post-promise of a text once he landed. It only took a half an hour for Ronan to come back home, but by that time it was late-afternoon and nobody was home. After he fed chainsaw and put his odd Daughter to sleep in the spare room he’d set up for her, he was asleep by ten o’clock and dreaming by eleven.

This dream felt too real to be comfortable. Ronan felt the crisp breeze raise the goosebumps on his skin, and heard the gentle rustling of the trees overhead too clear to be simply a dream. He felt every breath of wind and every falling leaf that grazed his bare arms, and he felt every step on the leaves beneath his feet because he willed for it to be fall in Cabeswater and it  _ was. _ He felt the minimal heat of the sun on his skin because he willed for it to be daytime; night was too dark to feel safe in Cabeswater. Only now he didn’t feel safe at all. Something was messing with his brain or with the balance between his dreams and reality. He didn’t know why and he didn’t know how but he knew something was wrong and that was enough to make him uneasy. He woke from this dream too quickly. Could he call it a dream? He wasn’t sure if the confusing fuckery of his dreams lately qualified as actual dreams, but after sitting in  the dark for two hours, all he wanted to do was to go back and see what was changing. 

He was asleep within an hour and a half, and opened his eyes in Cabeswater to the same feeling of restlessness deep in his bones. Ronan kept thinking of the glasses and the way the roots of his forest had grown around the glasses with time but he’d never noticed them before. Hyperaware, the only thing he could do was walk and find something; find an answer. Find some sort of explanation. 

“What is happening to you?” He touched the trees around him, his fingers feeling every little groove in the bark, every impurity of the dreamt up nature around him.

_ Non solus.  _ Every rustle was a voice as it had been before, only amplified and unstable.  _ Tu es non solus.  _

The voices threw him off much less than the finger tracing his tattoo did. He felt the single finger running circles along his shoulder blades, travelling up the back of his neck.  _ Non solus.  _ He’d been alone in his dreams since he’d taken Orphan Girl with him, and he never felt any touch as vividly as he felt this. Breath on the back of his neck, though neither people moved. Ronan only moved after he felt a palm on his shoulder, and he spun around while taking a step back. Never in his life had he been speechless seeing a face before. He’d found his father and his mother covered in blood before, he’d found his little brother who he dreamt in the trunk of a car about to explode. He’d kissed a person he’d been yearning to kiss for months and months. Only this was a face he  _ shouldn’t  _ have been seeing. It was a face he hadn’t thought about in a year and it was a face that only brought shame and guilt to his stomach. 

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” It was the only thing Ronan could’ve said staring in the face of the too-real dream version of Joseph Kavinsky. Everything was the same from what he remembered, only now he eyed Ronan up and down as if he was as surprised as he was. “How are you here? You fucking  _ died. _ ” 

“You fucking killed me, you bastard.” All Kavinsky could do was stare. Stare and stare and stare. He stared at his hands and at the ends of Ronan’s tattoo peeking through his tank top. He could only stare at the forest around him and how alive this felt when he hadn’t been alive in twelve months. “Not even a hello, no?”

Ronan could only shut his eyes and will for his body to wake up. He’d dreamt of Joseph before. He’d dreamt of him and Joseph standing in Cabeswater before. He’d dreamt of Joseph in Cabeswater the night the ley lines regained their power from the dead dream thief, the night he’d threatened to kill Ronan’s little brother.

“Were you dreaming about me, Lynch?” Kavinsky’s eyes locked on the white sunglasses Ronan was sure he’d thrown away. “Did I make that much of an impact that you’re still thinking about me a year on? That’s fucking  _ gay _ .”

Ronan’s teeth could only clench at the comment. He had no words. The unease was building and building and this was too real to only be a dream. The feeling of guilt and feeling of everything in the forest was a sensory overload for Ronan, and the very  _ dead _ Bulgarian bastard standing in front of him just caused a headache. Kavinsky walked around Ronan, almost inspecting him now, but not touching. Ronan knew  _ this  _ wasn’t his doing because of the fear he could see in his cocaine-withdrawn eyes. He saw fear in the way his smile curved into a smile, the way his skin paled and eyes twitched at the sight of the sunglasses. Neither of them made a sound for minutes, for an age, for an amount of time Ronan couldn’t count, for his heart was beating too hard and the trees were too loud.  _ Non solus. _

Kavinsky took Ronan out of a half fear half shock induced trance by putting a hand on his sleeveless bicep, a mischievous smile on his face.

“Wake up,” He smiled. “You’re asleep, yeah?”

Ronan squinted at him. He didn’t understand. 

“Wake up.” Kavinsky grabbed onto both of his hands, uncharacteristically intimate for a person like him. He raised his voice and got right into Ronan’s face, and Ronan only waited for him to turn into a dream creature. Ready to hurt him, using his old dead acquaintances face to make him more vulnerable. “Wake up!” He shouted.

Ronan’s eyes shot open back in his room. He gasped for breath, like something from some shitty movie Gansey would roll his eyes at. It was still dark outside, dark like he hadn’t been dreaming at all. Had he been? His clock read four in the morning. Time had passed, and that meant he’d been asleep for longer than he thought. Something felt wrong, something felt off. Sitting up on the bed, he looked out the door, listening to the quiet gluing and building of Gansey’s Henrietta from the other room. He opened his mouth to call out, when a cold hand clamped over his mouth.

“Don’t fucking say a thing.” Joseph Kavinsky hissed, and Ronan froze still at the very real breath on his ear.  


End file.
